Saturday, June 18, 2011

More Beaded DNA Earrings

I've had a few people point out to me that the base pair coding on DNA actually happens on the rungs of the ladder and not on the edge, as I did in my beaded DNA video. So, I found this image and came up with the version below.

Notice that I removed the bugle beads on the rungs of the ladder and replaced them with a row of 3 beads. I used two size 8/0 for A and G, and one 3mm fire-polished crystal for T and C. Now the color coding is on the rungs where it's supposed to be.

You can see from these photos that this new version is wider. The design in the video is shown below.

Personally, I prefer the more delicate look of the original, patterned design, but conceptually, I like the move towards scientific accuracy in this new version. Which do you prefer?

6 comments:

I was struggling with this too... I like the delicate look for earrings, but I'm such a biogeek that I have to prefer the more scientifically-accurate version. It's also a more accurate in another way; it puts the helix at about 9 base pairs per turn instead of the 8 in the original pattern. B-DNA in biology is a little more than 10 base pairs per turn.

I made one of the earrings from the video and cannot, for the life of me, figure out how you get it to maintain the spiral shape. I wanted to make a pair of these for a friend who recently earned a degree in genetics. I thought about dipping them in Pledge to stiffen them up. Please advise. Thank you.